CJ and All:
This topic is of unending interest to me, even though it's well-discussed and a wealth of opinions are exchanged:
1. My idea of the topic is that MATCH PLAY DOES NOT MATCH SKILL, IT MATCHES FORTUNE.
a. Match Play presupposes "Eveness" between players..., whether it is handicap shots or "less or more shots from a different set of tees," I find everything about match play to have been intellectually created by the statement, "All things being equal." What 8 handicapper doesn't play against the scratch club champion without strokes? We know who's better in skill there, so we level the playing field to get as close to equal as can be rationally apprised.
b. Match Play instills the players with their own sense of the equanimity...why do you concede a putt in a match of skill and more convincingly, why has anyone ever gotten mad when a 2.5 ft putt has not been conceded, and lastly why do some players agree before the round to a standard of such putts, the leather? This is not about skill...if it was, we'd insist you prove it. We are all the same over a short putt of any importance and the players spare each other of just "bad fortune." An absolute purist often doesn't concede a single putt; though he is compelled, officially, to take them and their result. I don't like that style of play myself, but i do understand where he's coming from as he's saying, "We're here to see what happens."
c. Match Play is ready to test skill AND fortune in its approach to championship iterations. At most clubs, private or semi-private, they play flighted President's and Governor's Cups WITH HANDICAP but the official Club Championship WITHOUT - the latter is a test of who's better, more skillful without regard to relativity. And we design for either level of prestige, as in all sports, a tournament bracket where SKILL is rewarded a second time, in that maintaining a 2 HCP will create your first matches against a 9 HCP, a player who you are more skillful than by the best discrete, rational measure we have.
2. WHAT ARE THE FEATURES THAT FAVOR FORTUNE OVER SKILL?
a. wind, changeable climate - not a design feature, per se but a feature nonetheless; one that would logically embrace the original match play traditions found in those climates of Scotland. On a more literal basis, can you think of any one thing that levels the playing field and is the very essence of fortune more than wind?
b. absence of vision and/or discrete measure - put me and Phil Mickelson in side by side stalls at the range tee hitting to the 150 flag and I've got no chance. Put us on opposite sides of the fairway hitting into a Punchbowl, I've got more of chance, due more to fortune than any skill I may have. And there are varying degrees of the level of sight and appraisal, short of pure blindness...partial camouflage intended to deceive and thwart the judgement of the player - one of the essences of his level of skill.
c. large greens - I don't think it's a revolutionary thing to say, that a putter is the club with which we are more like, if not better, than players better than us. It is the thunderbolt for the common man and whether we think contemporaneously or in the older era - it was a backhanded slight to be called a player "who makes bombs" - it has been code for "lucky" since the shepherds were belting rocks. Again, in the mythical match with Phil, he's in for a tap-in birdie 3 and you're lying 2, trying to half, from 25 yards away, what club and what kind of shot do you want, that is more likely to succeed than a putt?
d. heavy and varied contour - specifically, big, uneven contour right near the strategic "medal" play areas in both fairways and green complexes. This is a feature not only revealed (in those course now called" match play" courses) but easily understood if you accept that match play is seeking to measure fortune in greater proportion to skill. Big features - swales, mounds, dips, hillocks both subtle and frank - reign in the more skilled of the matched players by chancing to reward his better, more skillful shot with a bad lie, a run off into rough, an absence of vision or a carom into poorer, strategic location.
dd. On the greens, dramatic contour - no matter what speed they are at - is most important as this is the place of the prize. Not only do broad contours deflect shots aimed at hole locations and require skill PLUS fortune to approach, but in the act of putting itself such contour elicits heightened judgement and imagination from the player. And their relative skill in this area closest to the prize is a just difference maker; as it defends the more skillful player from being subject to the bad luck of a lesser opponent's hot putting. Such a victim can make bombs too and if he truly is the better skilled -- and not just the less or more fortunate -- he has an equal opportunity to prove it here, nearest the prize.
e. "in-play ephemera that shouldn't be there" - not merely the road of the Road Hole (which has actually got two w/ the OC Hotel) but it can be elements as literal as that...railroad tracks, stone walls, memorial markers, plaques, clumps of irrecoverable gorse and anything that gets in the way. At St. Andrews, the "Gowf" was the second use of the land, played around it's first use, and so the "stuff that gets in the way" is prevalent, arbitrary to golfers, accommodating for the first uses. More intrinsically to our discussion context, this extends to both natural and artificial uses of landforms reflected in choices of the architect. Will you put a green site in the midst of cottage ruins, that chances to turn a mis-hit into something more or less worthy? Will you bench a green into a side of a hill that either gathers or rejects at will, will you grow rough on that hill, will you cut some or all of it as green or put a bunker up there? On an subliminal level, I suspect this goes even further to ridiculous and charming elements such as pot bunkers, bunkers in the middle of a green like 6th Riviera, the Sahara or Hell models (their names are part of the "out-of-context" environment as well). These are all items which tend to level the playing field between one player and another on the basis of fortune.
3. WHAT I HAVEN'T MENTIONED...
a. traditional hazards - in and of themselves, the strategic use of sand bunkers and water do not contribute significantly to a match of fortune between two sides. Even when carrying a bunker or skirting a body of water successfully sets up a preferable strategic result, that is one shot, not the hole and the opponent can avoid challenging the hazard and still win the hole. There is still something left in the accretive value of how you achieve or push the prize further. Those holes and those courses which offer hazard to both avenues of play are more rightfully said to be medal holes, as they are testing the quantity of skill you have to pull off a demanding shot, not the fortune of equivocated players. It is on those holes that you can and do make "10s" (TrumpFazio National Briarcliff) and your medal round is kaput if you do not execute. That's one of the foundations of a medal round...not blow up. TrumpFazio is testing that with vigor. Yes, you're right the same "10"' is worth only "down 1" and the fortune of the match is still out there, but that can be said of any hole.
b. green speed - I make no statements about green speed beyond these: the bigger the contour, the less you need speeds faster than 8.5. Yale has always satisfied in regard to this appropriate blend of massive contours and the right speed for them. Even though I regularly experience some of the speediest, most renowned greens in the country, I am depressed that the more "challenging" they get, the less putting is a true shot and the more it becomes just a trained movement of the shoulders. Who does that better or not is a very subordinate examination of those things elicited from any Golf match.
c. turf quality (fast, slow) - it should be clear from everything else I've said that the more discrete the task, the more it contributes to the medal play qualities of a hole in preference to its match play properties. The less uniform the turf conditions, the less predictable playing on it becomes and yields another micro-category of elements that match the fortunes of the players.
Maybe with this specificity, it's possible to return to an esoteric generality. "Medal play and courses designed for that play are designed to identify is who is the best and match play courses are designed to identify who is best, that day."
cheers
vk